diet cola

I can feel the judgemental gazes looking down on my and my aspartame filled diet coke, but please, just listen, I could save you calories.
For some of you who prefer sugar, need the calories, prefer the taste… that’s cool! I have no qualms with you loving a bit of the sweet stuff. However, if you have a rampant sweet tooth that cannot be tamed, let me open your eyes to the wonders of sweetener.
There are some natural sweeteners, such as those from the stevia plant, but that’s not what I’ll tell you about. We’re talking tasty artificial sweeteners, yum.Artificial does not mean bad or unsafe, it just means that clever people worked really hard to give us something that we’ve been demanding. Find a can of diet coke, have a read, it contains aspartame. It’s true that there are rumours of links with cancer (hello, Daily Mail?) and ‘aspartame disease’ (this doesn’t exist…) but it’s a load of, what I like to call, poppycock. Aspartame can be an issue for some people. As you may have seen, it’s contains a source of phenylalanine K, which can be harmful. HOWEVER it is only harmful to people with a condition called PKU, which only occurs in approximately 0.001% of the population. If that’s not you, and it probably isn’t (you would know if it was), then you are safe to have aspartame to your heart’s content! Enjoy!
There are other popular sweeteners about, obviously, including sorbitol. Sorbitol is often used on sugar free gum. The good news is that the only problematic side effect of sorbitol is it’s laxative effect of you consume too much. That’s right, if you have too many of those tasty mints, you might get the trots.
Sweeteners can be scary, people humans make them, but humans get put in charge of a lot of food matters and I don’t know about you, but Cadbury are not in my bad books!

Moral of the story: chill out. Why would manufacturers be allowed to give you toxic sweeteners that would cost the health services and governments extra money? They aren’t that stupid.